That ability to leap from A to Z was part of his luck. One of the things that made him a good cop. One of the things that made the chief crazy, because Harlan couldn’t explain it.
He didn’t know where the knowledge came from. He’d always had it. Not being given to flights of fancy, he tried not to examine the source of his knowing. He didn’t believe in psychic mumbo jumbo, but even so, some things were better left unexplained, even for a cop whose intuition had always given him an edge.
He didn’t like mysteries, though—especially when they were his own. So intuition was as good an explanation as any.
Glancing around the kitchen one last time, he knew Molly Harris had roamed through her kitchen last night, had her cup of milk and had gone outside. The knowledge was just there, inside him.
Stepping out onto the gallery, he looked down the rain-swept lawn toward the driveway and saw Tanner waiting beside the car. Walking toward him, Harlan turned once and stared back at the house encircled by moss-heavy oak trees, the moss hanging wet and gray in long loops.
The first-floor gallery, unscreened, wrapped the lower portion of the house. Off the rooms upstairs, a second gallery ran from the sides of the house all around to the back. With no outside staircases, that gallery was accessible only from the inside rooms opening onto it. On the tall, floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the house, the drapes and shades were drawn back. He saw the light shining on the table next to the sofa, saw Molly Harris’s red-and-pink quilt, imagined the thin line of her arm hanging down to the wooden floor. Imagined her soft mouth open in silent pleading.
The house had been closed off from outside eyes when he and Ross had first driven up. He’d thought it secretive as they drove up the winding driveway hedged by enormous double yellow hibiscus bushes. Climbing into his car and nodding to Tanner, who wandered back down toward the bayou, where bright searchlights sliced the dark, Harlan decided that Molly must have opened the shutters and pulled back the drapes when she’d fled back to the house after his earlier questioning.
He’d fought the urge to pursue her to the house.
Just as he now disregarded the sense that he should turn around and go back to her house.
Stay with her.
She’d been defenseless in his arms as he’d carried her past the open gallery into the huge, empty house.
Trying to ease the tightness between his shoulder blades, Harlan rolled his shoulders.
Firing up the engine, he let it idle for a long time as he continued to stare at the house, at the image of Molly in the long window facing him, the light shining down on her, while outside, night crept silently closer. Finally, he shifted into first and drove away, the rain blurring the windshield.
Stay with her.
The shoulder harness pulling against his chest, he turned and saw the house disappear behind him into the sheeting rain. Just before he looked back at the driveway, he frowned.
He thought he’d seen a shape move at the corner of the house.
Molly woke up abruptly, her heart pounding sickeningly.
The gleam of the lamp on the table turned the man’s hair carroty.
Her pulse slowed as she recognized him. He’d been here with Detective Harlan. She turned her head.
No one else was in the room.
Her mouth was dry—sleepy dry, not the cotton dry of fear. She wet her lips. They were cracked.
She yawned. She’d slept the afternoon through. Unbelievable. Perhaps she ought to see if the man wanted to Molly-sit in the evenings.
“Hey there, Ms. Harris.”
Struggling to rise, Molly found she was cocooned in her quilt, the wild hues splashing the somber, clean whiteness of her living room with streaks of reddish color.
Pushing the quilt away, she gagged, remembering the dark stains against Camina’s blouse, remembering other stains. “Where is everyone?”
“All gone. Harlan told me to stay until you woke up. The doc checked you out. You keeled over like a chopped tree and went right to sleep. Doc said to let you sleep, that you’d wake up in your own good time.”
“I was asleep?” She wanted verification. “Did I…” How could she ask him if she’d gotten up, draped in her comforter, and roamed her house, eyes open wide but her mind asleep, off guard?
“Relax. You never said a word.” His grin was wide and uncomplicated.
She’d been right. Nothing hidden in this man, unlike John Harlan with his enigmatic flashes of irony, his comments that implied more than they said. She shivered and pulled the comforter over her shoulders. She was glad the redhead had stayed with her. She didn’t like the idea of waking up and knowing that the detective had watched her in her sleep, watched her while she was vulnerable. She shivered again.
“I just…slept?” Molly huddled into the quilt, relieved.
“Oh, you squeaked a few times, like you were trying to say something. That’s all.” He stood up and stretched his long arms toward the ceiling. “John said to check in with him when you came to. I’m supposed to tell you not to take any out-of-town trips.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I’m supposed to tell you also that John will be back tomorrow. You’ll need to have your lawyer with you. If you want, you can come into the station instead, though.” He wrinkled his face, too young and embarrassed to be comfortable confronting her with their suspicions.
“Yes. Of course.” Molly cleared her throat. “Why didn’t Detective Harlan arrest me today?”
“Well, you’ll have to ask him, ma’am. Tomorrow,” the redhead said reassuringly. “I don’t think he was afraid you’d run off, though. You aren’t going to, are you?” Worry creased his freckle-splotched face. “Because Harlan would kill me if he thought I hadn’t made it clear that you were only being questioned, ma’am, not arrested. No cause to do anything foolish, ma’am.”
“Not yet, anyway?” Molly managed a laugh. It wouldn’t have fooled John Harlan, its high pitch patently false even to her own ears, but the young technician smiled back in relief.
“Well, good night then, ma’am. You want to lock up behind me?”
Wrapped in her quilt, Molly still felt shivers edging bump by bump up her spinal column. “Oh, yes. I’ll see you out through the kitchen.” Rising too quickly to her feet, she was momentarily dizzy, but she steadied herself on the arm of the couch. “Do you mind waiting with me here while I close the drapes and lock up?” She shot him an easygoing smile, not letting on how desperately she wanted him to stay in her house all night while she slept. This young man. But not John Harlan. She wouldn’t have slept had he remained behind.
“Nope, I don’t mind. You want some help?” He walked toward the front door.
“No. Thanks, anyway. It will only take me a second more down here.” She had to check the locks herself. She didn’t trust anyone else, not even this blue-eyed young cop.
While Ross Whittaker—he’d told her his name—waited, Molly went through her nightly routine. With him by her side, she felt safe from the fear that she was whirling off into some world she’d never escape from.
Ross Whittaker was so normal that he made her believe during these moments that she’d imagined everything that had happened to her in the last months.
Made her forget until she saw him out the kitchen door and bolted it behind him.
In the windows over the sink, the darkness edged close to the house, pushing at the walls, seeking entrance.
Moments earlier, with Whittaker here, she’d forgotten the way the moss in the trees nearest the gallery moved with the breeze, shadows on shadows in the darkness.
Quickly she checked the window over the sink and closed the shutters against the night. She shuddered.
She was afraid to go up the stairs to bed. She’d checked the upstairs with Whittaker, but now she couldn’t make herself go back up the dark hallway.
She should have left a light on. Why hadn’t she? She’d been trying too hard to be normal, the way she’d been before, afraid of nothing, ready for any new experie
nce.
Standing in the kitchen, staring at the back staircase, Molly fingered the satin binding of the quilt. Could she make herself climb up into that thick darkness, darkness pressing with a palpable weight down the long tunnel of the stairs?
Prowling through the rain-wet grass, he eased his way to the house.
She was awake.
He’d watched her for so long now that he knew her, knew her with an age-old knowing that went bone deep. He knew her. From the beginning, he’d recognized her. She was the one he’d been waiting for all this time.
He knew that she wouldn’t sleep tonight. He circled the gallery silently, avoiding the flowerpots lining the edge of the gallery, skirting the board that creaked with his weight. Circled, coming closer to her.
He could see her now, the gilt brown of her hair. Could smell her fragrance, the light, familiar scent drifting to him in the rainy night.
The scent had clung to her hair. Familiar, that fragrance, drawing him closer to her.
Molly heard the sound.
The bump against the house raised gooseflesh along her arms and she couldn’t move. This time she couldn’t open the door, even though she told herself that the noise was nothing. The stray cat, probably. A raccoon. Nothing more than that.
But she couldn’t move. And she was wide awake—she knew she was. She wasn’t sleepwalking. She wasn’t imagining that slow, muffled sound against the walls of her house.
God help her, the sound was real. Something wanting in.
If she could move, she could reach for the phone. She would call…someone.
Then there was silence.
Heavy. Expectant.
She screamed as the huge shadow leapt from behind her, darkness flowing past her and onto the counter.
Clutching the quilt to her shoulders, Molly couldn’t stop the screams ripping through her even as his head butted her chin and he stretched on his back legs, curling a smooth front paw against her cheek.
Even when the big cat rubbed against the goose bumps on her arm, his solid body vibrating to soundless rumbles, even while she clung to him and buried her face against the powerful muscles of his sides, she couldn’t stop screaming.
CHAPTER FOUR
His eyes snapped open.
She had been screaming.
Against the ceiling of Harlan’s room, the shadows of palm fronds swayed and lifted restlessly.
The overhead fan stirred the fringes of his Guatemalan wall hangings, puffed the fabric. Muted in the dark, the jungle figures became alive with the currents of air.
Sweat beaded down the length of his chest, pooled in his navel as he lay naked under the drifting shadows and watched them move. Never turning his head, he studied the palm-tree silhouettes, their gray, two-dimensional forms on the video of his ceiling.
She had been screaming.
As he watched, time trembled, hung suspended, and there was nothing but utter silence outside his open window.
Then, with a downward whoosh, sound filled the void. The slam of a car door two streets over. A rustling in the grass. The slip of his sweat sliding against his skin. He ran his palms over his chest, down his thighs and let his arms fall shoulder height out to the side, his feet crossed at the ankles. A crucified figure from Roman times, he lay on the sweat-damp sheet, thinking. Impressions moved in and out of his mind. He slicked his hands down his chest and recalled her hands moving over him. Dreams. Her small palms stroking him. Reality.
Things were happening, rushing out of control. He sensed that.
And evil slipped through the darkness. Face averted, it hesitated, and moved on. But it was there. It would return.
She had been screaming.
His abdominal muscles contracted, lengthened, as he sat up on the wide rosewood bed and swung his legs to the floor. With one step he was at the bare window, looking down into the courtyard of his apartment building.
The rain had stopped. Clouds scudded across the moon, hiding it, and in the fitful light, the underwater globes of the empty pool backlit leaves floating on the surface. Empty deck chairs humped in four-foot stacks against the wooden fence draped with flame vine. In the daytime, the bright orange flowers would glow. Now, in the uneasy gloom, they were shapes against the fence, bleached of color by the night.
He remembered the vague sense of something moving stealthily at the corner of Molly’s house as he pulled away.
His skin prickled.
He should have stayed with Molly Harris.
Punching in numbers on the phone, he shifted the receiver from one ear to the other as he paced around the room. He rubbed his belly and waited for Ross to answer. His gut was twisting in knots.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Harlan shifted the receiver back to his right ear. “So you can go back to sleep after you hang up. You’re young. You won’t miss five minutes of sleep. You’ll get no sympathy from me.” Grabbing a pair of jeans from a ladder-back chair, he shrugged into them. The zipper was cold against his skin as he bent over and rummaged for his boots under the bed. “So how long did you stay at Ms. Harris’s lovely abode? Yeah? Anything happen after you left? Any phone calls? No? Well, I’ll be damned.” Thick socks on, he eased his feet into boots, balancing easily on one foot at a time. “No, no problem. Go back to sleep, Ross. Thinking about it, I reckon you do need your beauty rest. I’ll catch you up later.” Harlan plunked the receiver back onto the phone base.
In seconds he’d thrust his head and arms through a black T-shirt and had reached for his wallet and shoulder holster. Hooking a thin, black leather bomber jacket with one finger, he turned to look back at the bed.
Twisting and turning in his sheets, he’d thought of Molly Harris with him there, the softness of her breasts against his hungry mouth, her skin hot against him, her fragrance rising to him….
It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself to want a woman.
But he wanted her.
Remembering, he twisted the doorknob with his fingers, their tensile strength hard against the cool metal.
Yeah. He wanted sweet, murderous Molly Harris.
The door rattled in its frame even though he shut it gently. Moving in the shadows down to the parking lot, he looked around before getting into his car. Nothing.
He left the top up and opened up the V-8 engine full throttle down the dark, untraveled back roads leading to her house, hanging curves, riding the power as the car vibrated under him.
Turning off the engine at the bottom of her drive, he coasted, lights out, until the sports car rolled quietly to a stop under a large magnolia tree. The shadows of its leaves dappled the long hood of the car as the moon moved between cloud banks. Harlan shut off the interior light and stepped out of the car, snicking the door closed behind him.
Ahead of him, lights blazed in wild abandon from Molly Harris’s home. With country silence all around him, those lights shouted discordantly.
Harlan cocked his head.
The tick of the cooling engine in back of him.
He waited, listening.
A gust of wind turning the leaves. Rain dripping onto her gallery. The slap of the bayou against the dock pilings.
Way off, the susurrus of water on sand.
And then he heard her, heard her slow breathing. From her kitchen.
Slipping silently through the grass, moving up to the gallery at the back of her house, Harlan tracked the sound. He stopped below the gallery and vaulted soundlessly to the far end of the gallery and stooped there in the corner, observing her through the gap between the shutters and the edge of the window.
Shards of glass sparkled on the floor. Flung from one end of the room to the other, pans tilted crazily, lay upside down. One pot careened on a stove burner. Cupboard doors hung open, and a pile of sugar rose on the counter. In the middle of the chaos, Molly stood, curiously stationary, her chest rising and falling in a slow, regular rhythm. In one hand she held a broom, in the other a dustpan.
It was her face that fascinated him.
Serene, it was as empty as the tide-washed sand at early morning. And despite the upheaval, that slow breathing…Disturbing, that subtle movement of her breasts under her pajama top.
She let the dustpan and broom fall from her hands. They clattered to her feet and she looked down at them absently, her unchanging expression blank and empty. Her hands dangling at her side, she approached the kitchen door.
Two clicks. First one bolt, then the other.
One hand on the gallery ledge, Harlan rolled to the ground below, disappearing from the corner as the door opened and Molly stepped out. Barefoot, not looking around her, she walked in a straight line away from the house, away from the bright lights and the wide-open kitchen door behind her.
Trailing her, Harlan stepped where she had stepped, moved when she did. A cloud drifted over the moon and he moved closer to her in the darkness. Her gaze fixed on the winding ribbon of the bayou, she never looked down at the scratchy shells, the muddy edge of the sand, never looked around to see him, stalking her.
And the rhythm of her breathing never altered until she stopped at the water’s edge, where Camina Milar’s body had been found. Bending smoothly under the rippling yellow tape that marked off the murder scene, she walked to the dock where Camina had been killed.
A wraith under the fitful moon, Molly Harris seemed to float onto the pier as Harlan watched. Clouds dropped lower, darker. Lifting his head, slanting it, Harlan smelled the approaching rain. Before morning it would come streaking out of the sky again.
Grass parted over the toes of his boots as he edged toward the dock. A slim, pale figure, motionless, she faced out to the water, which moved darkly past. Her scent drifted down-wind to him as he slipped closer, the hunt pulling him forward.
He wondered for an instant when he stepped out of the shadows below her whether he’d startled her or if she’d known all along that he was pursuing her. Almost as if she expected him, Molly Harris turned slowly to him, the hems of her white pajama bottoms drooping over the narrow, high arches of her feet, bunching and catching under her bare heels.
Stopping twenty feet away, head angled toward her, Harlan watched her hair lift as she pivoted, the dark strands sliding back to her cheeks in slow motion.
Lover in the Shadows Page 6